Flight MH17: the unctuous Bishop James Jones shows off on ‘Thought for the Day’

Perhaps it’s my imagination, but every time the Rt Rev James Jones, former Bishop of Liverpool, pops up on Thought for the Day I hear an undertone of disappointed ambition. The same goes for Lord Harries, ex-Bishop of Oxford and, like Jones, once spoken of as a future Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s as if they’re saying: look how much poetry and gravitas I can pack into three minutes! I’d have been jolly good at Lambeth…

Bishop Jones’s prose this morning, when he reflected on the murder of 298 people by allies of Vladimir Putin, was as purple as his episcopal robes: ‘black bodybags lining the fields of sunflowers, the refrigerated train of five grey carriages’. It would be wrong to suggest that Jones’s sympathy for the relatives of the victims of air crashes was confected.